City Indian

Winner, Robert G. Athearn Award for best book on 20th Century American West

In City Indian, Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck recount the engaging story of members of the American Indian community in Chicago who worked toward “determining our own destiny,” in the words of Chippewa leader Scott Henry Peters. They were doctors, nurses, business owners, teachers, and entertainers. They developed new associations and organizations to advocate for recognition and justice.

City Indian recounts how during the Progressive Era, more than at any other time in the city’s history, American Indians could be found in the company of politicians and society leaders, at Chicago’s major cultural venues and events, and in the press, speaking out. They voiced their opinions about political, social, educational, and racial issues. When Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson declared that Chicago public schools teach “America First,” American Indian leaders publicly challenged him to include the true story of “First Americans.”

A new era in American Indian activism dawned at the beginning of the twentieth century. As reservation communities in the United States suffered severe economic devastation, and both policy makers and the public at large consigned the place of Indians to America’s past rather than its future, a new group of American Indians sought to make a place for themselves in modern America. They laid the groundwork for a thriving American Indian community in Chicago.

Praise for City Indian

“A welcome addition to the robust field of studies of Indians in urban places…. LaPier and Beck have given this important story the attention it deserves.”—Sherry L. Smith, South Dakota History

“City Indian is a most important addition to the literature on Native activism, the history of Indigenous representation, and urban history.”—Coll Thrush, Michigan Historical Review

“Mercifully, the fields of ethnohistory and Native American studies have recently witnessed an important movement of new scholarship on American Indian urbanization in the twentieth century that has begun revising the old narrative in impressive fashion. Rosalyn LaPier and David Beck’s City Indian not only makes an excellent contribution to this emerging trend; it also focusses on the turn of the twentieth century – easily the blurriest period in the history of Indigenous urbanization. Whereas a few recent studies have pushed the narrative of the urban Indian back to this period, this is the first to expand it into monograph length…. [S]cholars of not only the vital and maturing field of Indian urbanization, but also activism, education, labor, and modern Indigeneity, should consult this volume and add a copy to their shelves…. City Indian is a nice companion to Philip Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places.”—Douglas K. Miller, Journal of American Studies

“Rosalyn LaPier and David R.M. Beck . . . add to a growing literature on urban Indians’ experiences with their fine monograph City Indian.”—Paul C. Rosier, Anthropos

“[T]his is an enlightening study, that critically but fairly examines the achievements and failings of Indian and white peoples. And one with a message not just for historians, anthropologists, students and others interested in ethnic relationships, along with the history of a major city. But also for writers: clear, strong prose can powerfully convey the most complicated, changing, frustrating of human social, racial, and legal relationships.”—Michael C. Coleman, American Studies in Scandinavia

“A substantial contribution to emerging scholarship on Native Americans and cities that provides fresh insight and helps us understand the motivations, strategies, tensions, controversies, and triumphs that have characterized the work and lives of local and national Indian leaders.”—Nicolas G. Rosenthal, author of Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles